Réunions

It's college graduation season, which means that it's reunion season, too -- that time when college alumni go back to their alma mater and drink heavily to forget how old they really are. Here are 20 things that will (probably) happen when you go back to your 20th college reunion.

I thought I'd share a few coping mechanisms that worked for me, transforming a fright night into a pleasant party (if you're a social butterfly or an accomplished salesperson, these suggestions probably seem like second nature to you).

I've never attended a school reunion in my life. Not high school, college, or graduate school. Never. But the 50th Oswego High School (NY) reunion was irresistible to me. I asked myself, "If not now, when?" And so I booked the hotel, rental car, and flight, and took off for Lake Ontario.

Maybe at 20 you still take the very notion of a lifelong friendship for granted. A grand statement that is meaningless when you're barely out of your teens. But now, a few years later, we seem to know better.

Now that Philomena is going into wide release and has been nominated for four Oscars -- I have a few words to say about the film and about the facts it was based on. You might say I have standing in the matter.

Can we go back in time successfully to reunite with long lost lovers? Every once in awhile, I read about a couple rediscovering each other decades later and living happily ever after. But is that a dream or reality?

In my own utterly unscientific random sampling of my generation, I have concluded that high school was pretty much a bust; if not a total disaster, then potentially the most annoying time ever, with angst and insecurity as much of the daily routine as was the cafeteria food served on plastic trays.

How can such a thing be? How can we love another so deeply and then find that love and connection to be gone, nowhere to be found? I believe it's because the connection wasn't at the level of the soul.

They can't be avoided and they tug at my heart -- the flyers crying out for lost cats and dogs. I try not to look at the postings, but find I am drawn to the sad faces and I involuntarily begin to scour yards, sidewalks and driveways, hoping to spot a glimpse of the lost pet.

Game over. Harvard wins 34-24. Everyone beams. I beam at the woman behind me and she beams at me and apologizes for her child kicking me in the head. We surge out of the grounds in the late afternoon sunlight and for one moment it is 1975 and I am young again.

Often, the mythical mean girls we feared in grade school -- and those we fear now -- may exist only in our own heads. And when it comes to all this leftover adolescent angst, women seem to have much thinner skins than men.

When does one officially know midlife is a thing of the past? Some claim it is when your first child turns 40 or the first time you are called "Nana" or "Grammy." For others, it is when not one word can be read without glasses, or when they can't find the damn glasses. This is when I knew.